On September 12, two subcommittees of the House Education and the Workforce Committee held a joint hearing, “Expanding the Power of Big Labor: The NLRB’s Growing Intrusion into Higher Education.” Whether or not you are a fan of the National Labor Relations Board and unions, you should still be deeply concerned about how this federal agency is (mis)treating Catholic colleges and universities.

The NLRB has jurisdiction over unionization, but that jurisdiction ought not to extend to religious higher education since the government should not be interfering with the governance of religious institutions (see: separation of church and state). In fact, the NLRB has already had its hand slapped in a number of notable court cases because of its over-reach. But those court decisions haven’t stopped the NLRB, which keeps insisting that it can and should get involved when employees at one Catholic institution or another start a unionization drive. How does it justify this? In these instances, the NLRB claims that, for one reason or another, the Catholic colleges or universities just aren’t religious enough to have religious rights under the First Amendment. No matter that it is exactly such line-drawing and trawling through the internal lives of religious institutions that the courts have told the NLRB to stop doing!

Whether or not the NLRB is trying to “expand the power of big labor,” as the joint hearing insisted, it clearly is running roughshod over the institutional religious freedom of faith-based colleges and universities.

Further reading:

Michael P. Moreland, Testimony to the joint subcommittee hearing, Sept. 12.

Kevin Theriot, “Protecting Catholic Colleges from External Threats to Their Religious Liberty,” Jan. 2011 (Center for the Advancement of Catholic Higher Education at the Cardinal Newman Society).